If you go to this page,
https://courses.missouri.edu/faculty/blackboard/safeassign.php and scroll down
to about three quarters of the way, you will find the following entry:
A SafeAssign report contains three parts:
1. Paper Information, including author information, submission date, and a
Matching score. This score is a guide to how much of the paper has been copied
from other sources, but does not indicate whether the copied portions have been
correctly cited or not. It may also return some false positives.
And the problem of false positives does not seem to be confined to SafeAssign:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/13/detect
Miguel
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul C Bernhardt" <[email protected]>
To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, March 20, 2010 12:23:48 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [tips] Using SafeAssign
I'm wondering about others' experiences using SafeAssign, if you'd care to
share.
SafeAssign is Blackboard's plagiarism detection system built into Blackboard.
I'm using it for the first time this semester. I had used, sparingly, Turnitin
in the past. Turnitin seemed to be pretty accurate. That is, when I compared a
sentence or phrase if flagged, I was able to find it without difficulty in the
supposed source document (mainly because Turnitin flags it in the source
document, too).
Today I'm reviewing some papers using SafeAssign and I'm finding it flags
sentences for reasons that I cannot detect in the supposed source document. For
instance, this entire sentence was flagged in a student's paper "Public
Self-Consciousness, Private Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety factors were
examined in order to interpret the scales liability. " Ignoring the improper
usage of liability, I was fascinated that a source document somehow was out
there for the sentence. So, I proceeded to click on the link to that document
and this was what I got: http://www.uncg.edu/~p_silvia/tools/scs.htm I searched
that short webpage and did not find on the page the following key words:
examined, interpret, liability. Nor do I find a sentence that could be judged
as essentially similar in meaning. The word factor does appear as well as the
factors of the self-consciousness scale. I even examined the webpage source
code to see if these words or this sentence appears in the source code so that
it isn't displayed. Nope, not in the source code, either.
This seems to be a remarkable false positive from SafeAssign. It is not the
only one, just the easiest for me to relate to you. I found several other
similar apparent false positives today. My confidence in SafeAssign is
remarkably reduced.
I am also finding some true positives or at least correct findings of material
on students' papers that also appear in other sources. Only one of these is a
true plagiarism incident (minor). Mostly, it is flagging commonly found
phrases, citations and reference entries.
What experiences of use of SafeAssign do you have? Do you find similar problems
or are there secrets to how it should be set up that I need to pass on to our
IT folks?
Paul C. Bernhardt
Department of Psychology
Frostburg State University
Frostburg, Maryland
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